Hawaiian Vacations and LA Living

So far, summer has been great. It started out with a month at home in Hawaii to do absolutely nothing. And that’s barely an exaggeration. I took my Hawaiian vacation seriously and got a lot of relaxation in. It was great to go home and see my family, pets and friends.

Our “big-boned” cat

My family was happy to have me back too. It was my brother and sisters last few weeks at home before she heads off to Germany to work before going to college at the University of Michigan and he goes to California to go to a cross country camp at Stanford. Now 2/3 of us are Punahou graduates! Just two more years until none of us are in high school and I don’t even go to college. Time really flies by.

The siblings at my sisters graduation

Despite living on a golf course for 15 years, I really never played that much golf. Just occasionally over the summers when I was home. But this summer, my dad, brother and I played a ton together and for the first time in all those years living there, I actually played the course. My dad was not happy to see his golfing partners leave at the end of my vacation.

Golfing with my dad and brother

Being back in LA has been great so far though. I’m interning at Octoknow still, the Android startup I was at all of last semester and I’m also doing research in the Signal Analysis and Interpretations Lab on campus. It’s been a blast doing the dev for Octoknow this summer since we are working towards releasing by the end of the summer. There’s three of us working on the app and we have made a ton of really cool progress. I just finished implementing some really cool features involving the Google Maps API and I’m excited to keep pushing at it and try to hit the marketplace.

My laptop and external monitor. On Stack Overflow of course

The workplace we are at has a big supply of extra monitors so I’ve been rocking the dual screen setup with my laptop and it is my new favorite thing. If you’re a programmer, you have to try it out. Splitting the documentation/requirements and the code onto two separate screens really streamlines the process.

While I’ve been busy working since I got back, it hasn’t been all work. It’s been great to see friends again and I’ve already done some cool activities around LA. Last weekend, my girlfriend and I went cherry picking out in Palmdale which was awesome. I used to spend my summers in Michigan (the cherry capitol of the US!) so cherry picking is a must-do for summer activities for me and it was really cool that I could do it in California as well.

Searching intensely

I’ve also taken this summer as a time to really improve the cooking skills I was working on last year, since I don’t have a meal plan over the summer so expect to hear way more about that soon!

So far it’s really just been a great summer and there’s still plenty of time left to do more interesting and fun things so I’m really excited to see where it all takes me.